In a piece from today's Guardian about creative writing:Civil servants are usually the best writers. Perhaps it's because they spend their lives in the most soul-sapping of environments, so everything gets channelled into their fiction.

Seems a bit of back-handed compliment.

The anonymous writer also says this about witches: also get a surprising number of witches in my classes. Which is fine, as long as they don't write stories involving magical rituals. Reading about spells is about as interesting as looking at your neighbour's holiday snaps.

We don't have any witches in our group as far as I know although we do have two civil servants. And although no one is writing magical rituals as such, there are quite a lot of fairy stories going on.